Hard-drive and audio interface set-up - Advice please

Hello,
Please offer me some advice if you can. I have the new 13" macbook pro 2.26Ghz with Logic Studio. I am going to get a hard-drive that has both usb and firewire 800 interfaces and need to decide whether to get a usb or firewire audio interface. The crux of my problem is in what configuration to use the devices, which will determine which audio interface I choose. E.g.
1. Firewire 800 hard-drive to record tracks onto and back-up + usb audio interface; or
2. Firewire 800 hard-drive as above + firewire 400 audio interface daisy-chained; or
3. Record onto the internal hard-drive and use a usb audio interface; or
4. Record onto the internal hard-drive and use a firewire 400 interface.
FYI, the audio interfaces I'm looking at are the E-Mu 0404 USB or Focusrite Saffire LE, both of which have had excellent reviews.
Questions to consider, please, are: Which configuration will offer the best performance and least latency? Is it worth recording onto external hard-drive (7,200) or will the internal drive (5,200) be faster/as fast? Will daisy-chaining cause a significant drop in performance? Do you have any alternative configuration suggestions? Plus any other comments you can think of.
Thank you in advance
Jamie

The good thing about #2, if the drive enclosure also has a USB 2.0 interface you have the option of using/trying that configuration as well. I know a few that get away with using USB drives for recording.
Make sure the audio drive is formatted Mac OS Extended, with Journaling OFF.
Don't trust the drive formatting as it's delivered.
pancenter-

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External Hard Drive and Audio Recording Application

Hi, hope everyone is doing well today. I'm new to this forum but I have been occasionally browsing it from time to time and find it very useful. So I figured I would post a couple questions that I have.
First of all I would like to tell you all excatly what I want to do with my computer. Currently I am trying to optimize my computer for the Audio Recording Application I have *Cubase SX 3* I recently just upgraded my RAM from 512 KB to 1.5 GB. My next purchased is most definitaly going to be an external hard drive, which leads me to my first question.
1. If someone could recomend me an external hard drive that is abosolutly amazing for audio recording and such around $150. I would ONLY be using the drive to save my audio files. Definitaly needs to be firewire also.
2. Next question is. I've heard of people booting from their external hard drives which has nothing but there OS and there audio recording application. That way when they boot it up they don't have processes running "Behind the scenes" and taking up some processor power. Is this true? If so, how would you going about doing this and what would I need?
3. If anybody else that is reading this is like me and does alot of audio editing on their iMac G5 computer if you could give me some tips in optimizing the performance of the computer in order to get the most out of it.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks ahead of time everyone.
Bard
iMac G5 w/o iSight Mac OS X (10.4.4) 20" screen 2.0 Ghz, 1.5 RAM, 250GB Hard Drive

1. If someone could recomend me an external hard
drive that is abosolutly amazing for audio recording
and such around $150. I would ONLY be using the
drive to save my audio files. Definitaly needs to be
firewire also.
Hard drives are pretty much the same. 7200 rpm are obviously a bit faster than 5400rpm. Why Firewire? USB 2 is about the same speed as standard Firewire 400, but the drives are cheaper.
2. Next question is. I've heard of people booting
from their external hard drives which has nothing but
there OS and there audio recording application. That
way when they boot it up they don't have processes
running "Behind the scenes" and taking up some
processor power. Is this true? If so, how would you
going about doing this and what would I need?
OS processes are going to be running in the background regardless of which disk the OS is on, that's what an OS does! If you don't want more processes simply make sure you don't have any other apps open. I don't know Cubase, but a G5 will handle video editing along with background tasks no problem, and video editing generally involves far more data manipulation than just sound, even if you're doing multiple tracks.
You can easily install the OS on an external hard drive using your original system install disk. Simply connect the drive and choose that as the destination in the installer. To boot from that you would choose it in System preferences/Startup Disk. You could minimise that system by deleting other applications from that drive's Applications folder, turning off internet connections, disabling all widgets etc, but as long as you only have Cubase open it shouldn't make too much difference.
3. If anybody else that is reading this is like me
and does alot of audio editing on their iMac G5
computer if you could give me some tips in optimizing
the performance of the computer in order to get the
most out of it.
There's not really much else to optimise. Modern Macs are not like computers of old, and OS X is a very modern system, not requiring the type of disk optimisation etc that there used to be.
See: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25668

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Open System Preference > Time Machine
Click Options....
Ckick on external disk in list and hit the - button below the list to remove from the Exclusion list
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CS 5.0 launches the internet browser. > TO SLOW I DONT WANT THIS.
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You're not speaking to the right forum for your request. Help is a Suite-wide feature and here is the forum where the Help application is discussed, and where the proper Adobe people hang out:
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HT201250 I have two external hard drives. One is my Time Machine backup drive. The other I use for external storage of files (documents, photos, movies, etc). Can I set Time Machine to backup BOTH my Mac hard drive and my other external hard drive?

I have two external hard drives. One is my Time Machine backup drive. The other I use for external storage of files (documents, photos, movies, etc). Can I set Time Machine to backup BOTH my Mac hard drive and my other external hard drive?

Yes you can make multiple backups on one hard drive, for example if you’ve 1TB hard drive installed in your PC and you’ve two Mac Machines with 500GB drive each then you just make two backup images with size of 500GB each.
http://www.halfspot.com/use-your-pc-hard-drive-for-time-machine-backup/

What is the Best way to set up Photoshop on a new PC with multiple Hard drives and SSD?

Hi hope someone can help.
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I would like to know the best way to install both Photoshop and Lightroom on the storage devices. As you can see I will have two 3TB hard drives and one 250G SSD card.
For Photoshop I have read that it can be advantages to have the program on one drive the photos on another drive and the “scratch file’ on a third drive. It was even suggested that the PCs Operating system could be on a different drive than the program. Is this correct and if
so what is best to go on the SSD card? I will be partitioning the Hard Drives and I could even partition the SSD drive if that could help. In this case what size partitions are recommended?
If you can see a component below that you think would be an issue with running Photoshop and Lightroom, could you also let me know what you would recommend?
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BTW I would have liked to email this to Adobe support but could not find an email address to send it to. I hope this way works.

That's a nice system Kevin, and it will work very nicely with Photoshop. I do take it that you have 16Gb RAM in Total?
250Gb SSD is a good size, but you can still run short, and that will affect Windows performance. When you get your system, instal WinDirStat which gives you a graphic display of everything on your drive, like below. Clicking on any of the large areas will tell you what and where they are, so you can think about moving cache folders etc. to one of the HDDs.
Leave the Pagefile.sys on the boot drive. Think about disabling Hyphenate as it takes a ton of space, and too often crashes on wake up.
My Documents
Desktop
Downloads
Look at Bridge cache
iTunes backup
Other stuff like that.
Think about another 500Gb drive just for Photoshop Scratch. Drives are cheap as chips nowadays
Do yourself a favour, and invest $100 in Shadow Protect (or similar if there is such a thing) SP saves incremental backups every 15 minutes (you can set the interval, but it has no impact on performance with a system like yours). If you have a problem you can mount the back up at any of those 15 minute points, and open files from it. You can also make a bootable DVD image of your C drive, and be back up and running five minutes after disaster strikes.
Optimize Performance in Photoshop
Photoshop CC and CC 2014 GPU FAQ
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Happy computing, and have fun with your Creative Cloud® apps.

HT1553 I did the back up as instructed... Installed a larger hard drive and followed the restore instructions... Now I get a white screen with a folder icon and blinking question mark. When trying to set startup with new drive I get a bless tool error...

I did the back up as instructed... Installed a larger hard drive and followed the restore instructions... Now I get a white screen with a folder icon and blinking question mark. When trying to set startup with new drive I get a bless tool error... Help!!

If you have installed a new hard drive , you will need to have formatted it in Disk Utility correctly. This may explain your problem.
Boot into your 10.6 Install disk again at the top menubar > Utilities > select Disk utility and in there select your new hard drive, and select the tab Erase and choose to make the format as Mac OS Extended Journaled. When that is finished look in the main window to make sure that the partition map scheme says GUID Partition Table.
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Can I set Time Machine to backup both my hard drive and an external hard drive?

Hi. I've been working with a lot of family video lately and my internal hard drive has filled up significantly. iMovie doesn't seem to have a good archiving facility like Adobe InDesign which I use at work were all the relevant files are gathered together into one folder. Apple advised me to relocate my movie files to an external hard drive and herein lies my query.
Is there a way for me to set Time Machine to backup both my iMac's internal drive and the external hard drive that would contain my movie files? I've been using Time Machine for my backups for a few years now, but backing up the external as well has me stumped. If Time Machine could be used then all the necessary file accociations etc would be safely backed up as well - that's why I don't want to have to manually backup the external.
Anyone have any ideas? Thanks!

7string48 wrote:
Thanks so much Pondini!! You just quickly answered a question that none of the Mac people in 3 stores or Apple Care have been able to answer.If you can format it HFS+ (any variation of Mac OS Extended), it will work. If not, it won't.
I'm not too surprised about the Apple Stores, as they don't get much training on Time Machine. But AppleCare sure ought to know.
Oh...what about if the external drive is an array...like a Drobo with it's own proprietary formatting...I guess that would not work...??
I've never used a Drobo. A number of folks here have used them as their Time Machine drives, but I don't recall seeing anyone try to back one up with TM, so can't say for sure. But if you can format it as HFS+ (any variation of Mac OS Extended), it will work. If not, it won't.
At least part of the reason is, Time Machine uses the File System Event Store, a hidden log of changes that OSX keeps on each Mac-formatted disk/partition, to figure out what's changed and needs to be backed-up. See How Time Machine works its Magic for details.
See Time Machine - Frequently Asked Question #32 for details and considerations of backing-up multiple volumes with Time Machine.
However, even if it will work, that may not be your best strategy, depending on your circumstances:
Since Time Machine keeps copies of things you've changed or deleted, the destination needs to be considerably larger than the data being backed-up. How much larger varies widely depending on how you use your Mac, but a general "rule of thumb" is, it needs at least twice the space to be able to keep a reasonable "depth" of backups for you.
If you have a large internal HD, fairly full, plus a large external HD, and the files on the external don't change frequently, you might want to use Time Machine for the internal, and a different app to a different disk or partition, on a different schedule, for the external. Especially if space is a consideration, you might not need to keep previous versions of files on the externals. See Time Machine - Frequently Asked Question #27 for some alternatives.

Set up to save directly to external Hard Drive so cannot have separate 'back up'I now want to reverse i.e save to internal Hard Drive and 'back up' on external 'hard Drive'. Please advise me how to do this.

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For backing up your data I recommend that you use Time machine:
http://pondini.org/OSX/Home.html
rob at the orchard wrote:
save directly to internal 'hard drive'
When you import images or create other data files, file them in the appropriate places on your internal drive, don't delete them and let Time machine back them up.
Ciao.

I had to install a new hard drive and I lost my beats audio please help

I have a HP Pavilion dv7 7135us Entertainment Notebook PC and recently lost my hard drive and had to install a new one and now I don't have me beats audio or any of the settings for it, can someone please help me out?

Hi,
Please try the follwing package:
ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp57501-58000/sp57966.exe
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BH
**Click the KUDOS thumb up on the left to say 'Thanks'**
Make it easier for other people to find solutions by marking a Reply 'Accept as Solution' if it solves your problem.

HT1329 My large iTunes library is on an external hard drive. Can I set up iTunes on my new Macbook Pro and copy the library to it or are there any pitfalls?

I have my large iTunes library on an external hard drive. Can I set up ITunes on my new Macbook Pro and transfer/copy this library to the internal hard drive or are there any problems I should be aware of?

ITs an old Iomega 100gb external HD that has about 90gb of music on it. The Macbook has a 500gb HD. I would like to put the iTunes library on the internal HD so I have room to expand.
Phil0124 wrote:
You can copy it to the internal hard drive as long as it fits on it. How big is your library, and how big is your internal HD?
The only thing you do not want to do is over-stuff the internal hard drive. The OS needs some space to operate correctly, so if your iTunes library uses up more than say 80 to 85% of the internal HD's available space it may not be a good idea to transfer it over.
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I just bought a iMac G5 iSight from my school, how do I clean the hard drive and set it up as a new iMac, I just bought a iMac G5 iSight from my school, how do I clean the hard drive and set it up as a new iMac

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Message was edited by: EZ Jim

How do I set Catalogue to new larger internal hard drive and then delete the files from the smaller

I have just had a new 1TB internal hard drive installed in my PC and then the original smaller internal 500GB hard drive cloned onto it. The new 1TB is now Local Dick C and the smaller 500GB has been changed from C and is now Local Disk F. PSE11 is running from the new C and all my pictures are on both C and F but the catalogue is pointing to F. I want to delete all of the old files on F to free up space since they are all cloned to the new 1TB C, so I want the PSE11 catalogue to point only to the pictures on C. I have tried creating a new Catalogue and importing my pictures from C. The images come in and look connected to C but, when I close PSE11 and then reopen that new catalogue, the image path reads F, as does the original catalogue. So, now I have two catalogues apparently point to F but I want to: 1) have only one catalogue pointing to C; 2) the delete catalogues pointing to F; 3) then reformat F: so I have a clean 500GB old hard drive for future expansion. Can some please help?

Grant, all I can say is that another user was having almost identical issues a month or so ago. Unfortunately I cannot find the discussion thread now but my feeling is that it never resolved satisfactorily while both drives were connected.
To save you a lot of work formatting, copying, erasing and so forth why not just unplug the SATA cable from the old drive and see if the Organizer then starts behaving nicely with the new drive. If it does then you can go the destructive route on the old drive.
Hopefully the poster who had the similar problem might read this and update us on his/her situation - if it got resolved and how.
Cheers,
Neale
Insanity is hereditary, you get it from your children
If this post or another user's post resolves the original issue, please mark the posts as correct and/or helpful accordingly. This helps other users with similar trouble get answers to their questions quicker. Thanks.

I need to wipe my hard drive and I am worried about losing all of my emails once my computer is set up again. What do I need to do to prevent this?

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Backup your profile.
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Thunderbird_:_FAQs_:_Backing_Up_and_Restoring

Is it possible to keep all iTunes media on an external hard drive and not on my Mac Book and have ITunes still function?

Let me begin by saying I'm new to the Mac world as well as to the realm of online forums so I apologize if this is a question that was already asked and/or if it is a very noobish question...
But anyway, I just recently got the new Macbook Pro 15" with RD and I am curious if I can keep all of my Itunes media on an external hard drive without keeping any of it on the Macbook itself and have Itunes still function (when the HD is connected of course). I am trying to keep the computer memory clutter free and not fill it up with music and stuff so I want to keep all of my media on a 1T Buffalo external hard drive so the computer stays like brand new for a long time..Right now I have about 5G worth of music on my hard drive and I thought it was only on the hard drive and I just recently found out that it is also within the music folder on the computer itself. Any thoughts? Sorry if it is an odd question, I can try to rephrase the question if need be. Any tips or advice is greatly appreciated, Thanks!

Quick answer if you use iTunes' default preferences settings: Copy the entire iTunes folder (and in doing so all its subfolders and files) intact to the other drive. Open iTunes and immediately hold down the Option (alt) key (shift on Windows), then guide it to the iTunes Library.itl file in the moved iTunes folder.
If you put the copied iTunes folder in the default location of Macintosh HD > Users > *User Name* > Music then you don't even need to start with the option key held down, iTunes will automatically look for it there. (Make sure there isn't anything already in the iTunes folder there that you want to keep since you will be replacing it with the one you are moving.)
Longer answers if for any reason you do not think all library files are inside your iTunes folder (changed preferences settings at some point):
iTunes: How to move [or copy] your music [library] to a new computer [or another drive] - http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4527 - a somewhat bewildering and not always easily understandable set of options.
For the record there's this reference for iTunes 11 but it really doesn't strike me as having the specifics you need. iTunes 11 for Mac: Move your library to another computer - http://support.apple.com/kb/PH12168
2011 ilounge article: Transferring your iTunes library - http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/articles/comments/moving-your-itunes-library-to -a-new-hard-drive/ - An article with good background information (similar to the links above), particularly if you are not sure your media files are all grouped for quick answer above. Unfortunately under the single term "transferring library" it describes two very different moves; relocating just your media (not really transferring your library and not recommended unless you really need this configuration), and relocating media+database (really your whole "library"). Make sure you understand the difference before electing to move only media.

Hard-drive and audio interface set-up - Advice please

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